Abstract
The use of serious games in education and their pedagogical benefit is being widely recognized. However, effective integration of serious games in education depends on addressing two big challenges: the successful incorporation of motivation and engagement that can lead to learning; and the highly specialised skills associated with customised development to meet the required pedagogical objectives. This paper presents the Westminster Serious Games Platform (wmin-SGP) an authoring tool that allows educators/domain experts without games design and development technical skills to create bespoke roleplay simulations in three dimensional scenes featuring fully embodied virtual humans capable of verbal and non-verbal interaction with users fit for specific educational objectives. The paper presents the wmin-SGP system architecture and it evaluates its effectiveness in fulfilling its purpose via the implementation of two roleplay simulations, one for Politics and one for Law. In addition, it presents the results of two types of evaluation that address how successfully the wmin-SGP combines usability principles and game core drives based on the Octalysis gamification framework that lead to motivating games experiences. The evaluation results shows that the wmin-SGP: provides an intuitive environment and tools that support users without advanced technical skills to create in real-time bespoke roleplay simulations in advanced graphical interfaces; satisfies most of the usability principles; and provides balanced simulations based on the Octalysis framework core drives. The paper concludes with a discussion of future extension of this real time authoring tool and directions for further development of the Octalysis framework to address learning.
Highlights
Research in recent years has highlighted the educational values of “games”, “game simulations” and “serious games”
In this paper we presented a platform that allows: realtime authoring of roleplay simulations allowing the dynamic creation of 3D scenes; and verbal and non-verbal interaction with fully embodied Virtual Humans (VHs) to simulate a number of hypothetical scenarios to support educational purposes without requiring technical knowledge
We conducted two types of expert evaluation to study the effectiveness of the platform in terms of usability, as well as in terms of supporting the creation of motivating and engaging educational simulations based on HCI heuristics and using the Octalysis gamification framework
Summary
Research in recent years has highlighted the educational values of “games”, “game simulations” and “serious games”. A number of projects have investigated the use of serious games in class with encouraging results Enriching such games with VHs capable of engaging the learner in social activities provides the potential for rich learning experiences, as the gameplay is multimodal and learning becomes experiential. The high cost and the complexity both in creating bespoke 3D game content and interaction with VHs (bespoke dialogues and verbal and non-verbal behaviours) to match the requirements of the game’s premise deterred the wider adoption of gamebased learning featuring VHs. This paper presents wmin-SGP and studies the pedagogical value of this real-time authoring tool in supporting the creation of motivating and engaging roleplay game simulations for learning.
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